Clara's Victorian Ballgown

Clara is ready for a dance in a Victorian dress known as the crinoline. The crinoline is the classic hoop skirt featured in so many little girl's princess drawings. However, a young girl such as Clara would not wear a floor-length gown. A mid-calf skirt length would have been the fashion for a girl her age.

With fine stockings and kid leather shoes to match the dress, Clara will be ready to dance. To complete her outfit, a ribbon hairpiece would be worn over carefully curled ringlets. Clara would not have been old enough to wear her hair up, a style reserved for older girls and women.

The original dress is a thin ivory wool fabric with rust-red velvet ribbon trim on the bodice, waist, and skirt panels. The shoes are a matching ivory kid leather with mother-of-pearl buckles on the bows. The headdress would also be ivory and rust to match the outfit, although the original version of this headdress is ivory and olive green.

Be creative with your coloring. I simply provided the original colors as a reference for the paper doll's outfit. You may also be interested to know that along with white, ivory, and gray, these were some of the popular colors for clothing in the 1850s:



To print Clara's Victorian Ballgown, use this PDF file:
Clara's Dress 2 (632k)

Clara is a free, printable paper doll. Clara will be available on this blog as long as I continue to post new fashion pages for her. You can read the introduction for the Clara paper doll here.

To print the Clara paper doll, use this PDF file:

The Clara Paper Doll (718k)

If you like my paper dolls enough to want to share with others, please email or post a link to my blog rather than sending or posting a copy of the paper dolls. Refer your friends so they can enjoy the free, printable paper dolls on my blog. Please do not post my artwork on your own sites, modify any of the files, or distribute them to others.